Many enterprise storage solutions on the market enable the generation of read-only copies of storage volumes called storage snapshots. A storage snapshot is the state of a storage volume at a particular point in time. Rather than containing a separate copy of each block of the storage volume, the snapshot contains references to the storage blocks of the storage volume.
Some enterprise storage solutions also provide functionality for the generation of writable copies of storage volumes that are similar to snapshots. However, for such storage solutions the generation of the writable copy requires modification to metadata of each of the storage blocks of the storage volume that is being copied when the writable copy is generated. While modifying the metadata of the storage blocks is quicker than generating copies of those storage blocks, the amount of time required to update the metadata can be non-trivial, and is dependent on the size of the storage volume. In particular, generating a clone is generally an order of n operation (where n is equal to the number of storage blocks used by a cloned volume).